The Big Boys' League: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Troubled Playthings 3)

“Dad? What’s up?”

“Aileen,” I could tell we weren’t going to start out talking about what was really going on, “I’ve had my most creative day in… well, months.” He kept picking up one of his prototypes at random and thrusting it into my face before tossing it back down to the table. “Any one of these could be the thing that pushes me into the big leagues. It’s seriously crazy how exciting this stuff is…”

“Dad.” He shook my arm off the first time I tried to get a grip on him, but I was successful the second time around. “Did something happen today? You’re really on edge, I can tell…”

“Is something going on with Marcia, Aileen?” He wouldn’t look at me as he spoke, but I had a pretty good idea of the expression on his face right now. “Did she tell you anything? Maybe we’re both in the dark here after all.”

“She’s planning to move to the mainland,” I said, staring at my feet.

Dad’s voice was calm in a way that was unusual for him. “And this was apparently very difficult to tell me about, even though my sons moving away to where I will never see them again is something that seems very important for me to know.”

“They’re not moving to somewhere you can’t ever see them, Dad, you just need to—”

“Do you know how I got a clue something was up, Aileen? Mum called me.” I couldn’t stifle my groan. We’d asked the home not to give Grandma so much freedom with the phone, but apparently it was good for her to have the freedom to toddle off and ring us whenever she liked. It wasn’t so good for us. Her conversations were half-baked, and it was hard to convince her to pass the phone over to her minder to ask for a proper explanation. “Turns out Marcia paid her a visit and said all this stuff about how she was really going to miss her… well, you can imagine how that went down. Now she’s convinced she’ll never see the boys again and wouldn’t you know she seems actually capable of remembering that.”

Marcia had always been a bit soft when it came to Grandma, sometimes beyond common sense. “She’s gotten a new job, Dad. That’s the only reason she’s leaving. It’s not personal, it’s not some attempt to never see any of us again.” But in Grandma’s case, that was probably exactly what would happen. That little bit of reason she had left seemed to be her last connection to life.

“Marcia should have been the one to tell me. Not my fucking half-senile mother.”

“She knew you’d react like this Dad, it’s why she was taking her time to make sure she had some more of the answers before she let you in on the situation. It’s hard to deal with you when you get like this. Even I see that; it’s why I agreed I’d keep the news to myself until she was ready to explain it. Marcia’s only mistake was talking to Grandma like that, she should have known it wouldn’t just stay with her.”

He folded his arms and pouted and flung himself into his swivel chair. “I’m not a child, Aileen. I don’t need my daughter and a woman who has been living to humiliate me since she walked out on me conspiring on this sort of thing.”

“I’m sorry you feel like that’s what’s going on here, Dad. Marcia and I, we both just care a lot about you and we wanted to take the time needed to figure out how we can best help you through this situation.”

“There’s nothing either of you can do to help me,” said Dad. “This is fucking bullshit. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen.”

“It wouldn’t have to happen if you could figure out a way to get more money, Dad,” I started before I thought it through. That old mouth-before-sense thing again. “Marcia said she’d love for us to visit, any time. If we could afford to do that we might even get to see the boys more than we do now.”

“Get more money, she says.” He was addressing one of his robot abominations, turning it left and right so it seemed to be cocking its jangling head, attached to a rolling tank base by a tubular neck. “It’s almost like that shit grows on trees.”

“It might be growing in this very room, Dad.” I took the tank giraffe off the desk so the two of them would stop conspiring to mock me. “These things you build, they’re pretty amazing. I don’t know anyone else who has that talent. You could try to set up your own business selling stuff, maybe get another patent—”

Dad snatched the thing out of my hands, the protruding

end of a screw installed crooked scraping my fingertip, and dashed it straight down on the tabletop. The head flew off in one direction and disassembled further from there; one leg spun away in another. The poor thing: I had known it only a minute or so and I already missed it.

Then my whole mind was occupied in a duck and cover for survival as Dad hurled the damaged robot body at me at close range. “There’s no fucking money in this shit! Patents… just a lot of paperwork and nothing to show for it. I’m not letting myself get caught up in that scam again. You know what you need to succeed on the basis of your creative work? Capital. And I don’t mean fucking investors. All they’ll do is take more of your fucking ownership than they deserve and use it as justification to work you like a dog, like a fucking employee. The idea that you can make it on the basis of your talent is a scam, and don’t try to tell me otherwise when I’ve already lived it. I practically have a degree in the bullshit they feed you to keep you a nice compliant member of society. Such utter fucking bullshit.”

I heard him draw a wobbly breath from my hiding place under his table, and then there was a little noise of surprise. “Aileen?”

I peeked just far enough over the edge to see him. “You done chucking stuff around?”

“Fuck.” He never went off for long enough to really frighten me, and he was always incredibly apologetic. That was all I could manage to be glad about. “I’m sorry, Aileen. It’s not a word of it a lie, but it’s not a truth I should have subjected you to. A parent is supposed to protect his children from the utter shit of the world. I can’t even protect you and yet I think I’m entitled to have all the access to my boys I want.”

“Dad…” I had to bite down on my urge to protect him. I felt sad for him, but he’d known for months his arrangement with Marcia was only premised on her being generous and it could fall apart at any time.

So much for talking about my issues tonight. I trailed him back upstairs, tracking him to his bedroom before I peeled off to go to mine. He was going to be spending the rest of the evening getting high. He might as well already be there: he’d forgotten I was even around to be talked to.

I had to be grateful he wasn’t into something that made him violent, or was likely to become an escalating problem the more he did it. Weed was just… there. I’d tried it with Tamara and Callie once and it didn’t seem like something I’d want to do by myself. Definitely not as much as Dad was doing it… and he’d gotten a lot better since the early days of Marcia leaving. But he was pretty liable to slip back there now, and if he did even his very flexible and forgiving programming job was not likely to be something he could keep up with. He wouldn’t be supporting himself… and I wouldn’t have any way of leaving to have my own home.

It was something that played on me a lot these days. Callie was probably going to get to the point of living with Lucas, either at his parents’ existing place or a place no doubt bankrolled by them anyway. Tamara was setting up with her little sister, with what money I hadn’t asked but Steven had to be involved.

When was I going to be able to leave home? Not by the end of this year and probably not the next. It wasn’t like I could walk out on Dad if he wasn’t really functional. Even if I hated him so much I wanted to do that—which I didn’t—I’d end up hearing about it from Grandma or from Marcia sooner or later. Maybe even Elizabeth. I hadn’t asked for this responsibility, but here it was anyway, and nobody was going to lift it off my shoulders.

Dad was chuckling in his bedroom as he got his stuff together. I was going to have to cook for myself tonight, even though it was his turn.

How feasible was it, really, for us to continue like this? Eventually there would be no more money to cover the bills, or we would both be in too much of a state to continue functioning.